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This is the version of the article accepted for publication in Review of International Studies published by Cambridge University Press: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/26330

Misrecognition in the making of a state: Ghana’s international relations under Kwame Nkrumah1

Abstract

This paper draws on a Kleinian psychoanalytic reading of Hegel’s theory of the struggle for recognition to explore the role of international misrecognition in the creation of state subjectivity. It focuses on Ghana’s early years, when international relations were powerfully conceptualised and used by Kwame Nkrumah in his bid to bring coherence to a fragile infant state. Nkrumah attempted to create separation and independence from the West on the one hand, and intimacy with a unified Africa on the other. By creating juxtapositions between Ghana and these idealised international others, he was able to create a fantasy of a coherent state, built on a fundamental misrecognition of the wider world. As the fantasy bumped up against the realities of Ghana’s failing economy, fractured social structures and complex international relationships, it foundered, causing alienation and despair. I argue that the failure of this early fantasy was the start of Ghana’s quest to begin processes of individuation and subjectivity, and that its undoing was an inevitable part of the early stages of misrecognition, laying the way for more grounded struggles for recognition and the development of a more complex state-subjectivity.

Key words: Hegel; Klein; Ghana; Nkrumah; misrecognition; statehood; IR

Julia Gallagher Professor of African Politics

Department of Politics and International Studies SOAS, University of London

10 Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG jg35@soas.ac.uk

1 This article has benefitted enormously from the help and insights of the editors

and other contributors to this special issue, and the editors and anonymous

reviewers of the Review of International Studies. I would like to thank them, and

also members of the departments of Politics at SOAS and Royal Holloway where

early versions of this paper were presented.

2

What does a new state feel like? In a powerful passage of his book Africa must

Unite, Kwame Nkrumah explains what he felt on becoming leader of independent

Ghana in 1957, describing the ‘emptiness that colonialism has left’.2 He writes

about how he and his colleagues walked through Christiansborg Castle, the

British governor’s former residence:

Not a rag, not a book was to be found; not a piece of paper; not a single

reminder that for very many years the colonial administration had had its

centre there. That complete denudation seemed like a line drawn across

our continuity. It was as though there had been a definite intention to cut

off all links between the past and present which could help us in finding our

bearings.3

Nkrumah’s feelings chime with Ki-Zerbo’s description of newly independent

African states sitting on top of countries in which people were disconnected from

themselves, ‘a sort of shipwreck towed along by the thread of a history made and

written by the European conquerors’.4 Economic structures, Nkrumah wrote,

had been designed to feed Britain’s colonial interests, and contained ‘a kind of

2 Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (London: Panaf Books, 1998), p. xv.

3 Nkrumah (1998) p. xiv.

4 Joseph Ki-Zerbo ‘African personality and the new African society’ in American

Society of African Culture (ed) Pan-Africanism Reconsidered (Berkley: University

of California Press, 1962) pp. 267-82, p. 271.

3

Alice in Wonderland craziness about them’.5 The education system had trained

people to be ‘inferior copies of Englishmen, caricatures to be laughed at with our

pretensions to British bourgeois gentility, our grammatical faultiness and

distorted standards betraying us at every turn. We were neither fish nor fowl’.6

As African states were ‘born’ – granted independence – from the late 1950s

onwards, they formed new political units, replacing both pre-colonial and

colonial political entities. Ghana had no territorial form to return to and it

needed a new name to replace the colonial ‘Gold Coast’. Its physical boundaries

and state structures had been established through colonial conquest and were an

alien legacy for most Africans. Foreign rule had left Africans with a ‘crisis of

conscience’, a ‘loss of identity’.7 Now they were meant to become properly

African states, a conception that had shallow political resonance for many

Africans who were more inclined to think of themselves in ethnic or regional

terms8 and faced the enormous challenge of how to develop an African form of

5 Nkrumah (1998) p. 27.

6 Nkrumah (1998) p. 49.

7 Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism (London: Panaf Books, 1964), cited and

discussed by Ama Biney, The Political and Social Thought of Kwame Nkrumah

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

8 There’s a wide literature on this topic. For a sense of the range and scale of the

topic, see for example Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Ethnicity and National Integration

in West Africa’, Cahiers d'Études Africaines, 1:3, 1960, pp. 129-39; M. A.

Mohamed and John Markakis, Ethnicity and the State in Eastern Africa (Uppsala:

4

subjectivity. The new states carried plenty of baggage, but they needed to

establish themselves and their personalities afresh.

Nkrumah, who became prime minister of Ghana at independence in 1957,

describes Ghana as empty, crazy and alienated from itself, not properly self-

conscious and unsure how to act. To make matters more difficult, it was the first

African state to come into existence through independence. If it lacked self-

consciousness, it also lacked an immediate other with which to engage and

against which to fashion itself. How could it begin to find or make this other?

In this article, I use Hegel’s struggle for recognition and Klein’s psychoanalytic

theory to explore the way states realise themselves through external

relationships. This is to take up Epstein, Lindemann and Sending’s point that

‘self-other interactions... are what makes the self into a self’.9 In Hegelian terms,

newly-born Ghana might be described as a pre-subject, as yet it had not realised

itself as a state. In Kleinian terms it appeared to be in a schizoid-paranoid

condition, internally fragmented, lacking an ‘ego’ by which to organise its

selfhood. For both Hegel and Klein, the creation of coherent selfhood comes

Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1998); Peter Vale, Security and Politics in South Africa:

the regional dimension (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2003); and

Joshua Forrest, Subnationalism in Africa: ethnicity, alliances, and politics

(Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2004).

9 Charlotte Epstein, Thomas Lindemann & Ole Jacob Sending, ‘Misrecognition in

World Politics’ (framing paper for this SI, 2018), p. XX.

5

about through relationships; only by engaging with others beyond can it

understand itself. Hegel describes such processes as struggles for recognition

and Klein understands them through object-relations theory. I use a Kleinian

reading of Hegel as a model for explaining the mechanics of state-formation and

the Ghanaian example to think through what it takes to establish statehood ‘from

scratch’.10 In it, Klein fleshes out Hegel’s mechanics of recognition at the

individual level in a way that highlights a consistency of ideas between the two;

applying a Kleinian reading of recognition to the national/international level

takes her ideas well beyond her comfort zone of the consulting room.

I understand ‘statehood’ or ‘state-subjectivity’ as analogous to selfhood or self-

consciousness. It is made up both of a sense of self – the degree to which the

state can embody the identity and aspirations of its population – and its ability to

act, its agency. Statehood is therefore both a gathering together and making

sense of internal objects on the domestic level, and the capacity to exercise

agency beyond itself, on the international level. Nkrumah, as we shall see, did

10 Nkrumah’s powerful picture of starting from scratch is a little disingenuous.

Ghana’s independence was not an overnight revolution but 'achieved by staged

constitutional steps’, in which he was a key player, heading a transitional

government from 1951. David Apter: ‘Nkrumah, Charisma and the Coup’

Daedalus 97:3, 1968, pp. 757-92; p. 757. Nonetheless, his description of a

dramatically disruptive and historically unprecedented transformation, moving

from identityless-ness and conscienceless-ness to viable new state is persuasive.

6

both these things as he attempted to make the Ghanaian state, and each fed upon

the other.

It has puzzled scholars of Ghanaian and African politics that the man who

pursued pan-Africanism so vigorously, who set out to make a United States of

Africa, ended up producing the template for a group of independent states, which

have largely been unable to establish collective political and economic

groupings.11 I argue here that the emergence of Ghanaian nationalism and sense

of statehood happened because of Nkrumah's pursuit of pan-Africanism, not in

spite of it. The Ghanaian state emerged as an individual through its international

relationships, and in particular through the way Nkrumah forged Ghana by

‘splitting’ its external others into a good Africa which could be perfectly

identified with, and a bad West which could be completely rejected. Despite

historical accounts which suggest that both relationships were more complex

than Nkrumah painted them, his ideas of a dichotomised world were popular

and powerful. I show how he created these idealised others through processes of

misrecognition to make sense of a fledgling nation that barely knew what it was.

My argument is that misrecognition in IR is not only inescapable (as others in

this SI argue), but is necessary to achieve a sense of stability during periods of

11 David Birmingham, Kwame Nkrumah: the father of African nationalism,

revised edition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998); David E. Apter and James

S. Coleman, ‘Pan-Africanism or nationalism in Africa’, American Society of

African Culture (1962), pp. 81–115.

7

uncertainty. Nkrumah created a set of international relationships that were

rooted in misrecognition: his paintings of an idealised pan-Africa and a

demonised West were partly imagined, certainly flattened and idealised,

projected onto the wider world as a way to resolve internal ambiguity. Yet

despite their roots in fantasy, these relationships were productive in establishing

a fragile sense of statehood. Only once a degree of self-realisation had been

created, could the state begin to develop more mature international

relationships characterised by ambiguity and demanding a more robust

selfhood. By that time, Nkrumah had outlived his role. Thus my chief concern in

this article is intra-subjectivity and how it begins to be built on inter-subjectivity.

The argument builds on Epstein’s discussion of Hegel’s argument that the

formation of the subject is ‘steeped in concrete experiences’.12 It shares many of

the preoccupations found in the other contributions to this SI – with agency13,

sovereignty14 and the instability of recognition15 – but while they tend to focus

12 Charlotte Epstein ‘Recognition Theory’s Owl: theorising misrecognition with

Hegel and Lacan’ (this SI, 2018).

13 Miranda Holm and Ole Jacob Sending ‘States before Relations: institutionalised

misrecognition and the performance of statehood’ (this SI, 2018); Thomas

Lindemann ‘Agency, (Mis)Recognition in International Violence: the case of

French Jihadism’ (this SI, 2018)

14 Catarina Kinnvall and Svensson ‘Misrecognition and the Indian State: the

desire for sovereign agency’ (this SI, 2018); Ayse Zarakol ‘Sovereign Equality as

Misrecognition’ (this SI, 2018);

15 Kinnvall and Svensson (this SI, 2018); Epstein (this SI, 2018).

8

on the inter-subjectivity part of the Hegelian argument,16 mine remains largely at

the intra-subjective level.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, I explain my theoretical framework in more

detail, showing how a Kleinian approach to Hegel gives us a sharper analytical

handle on understanding the role of recognition and misrecognition in the

shaping of individual subjectivity. I outline three stages: first, manic-schizoid or

pre-cognition/subjectivity; second, splitting and idealisation or misrecognition;

and third, acknowledgement of misrecognition and the possibility for

recognition. The rest of the article explores these three stages in the early life of

Ghana, describing first, Ghana’s fragile condition at independence; second, its

early, idealised international relationships; and third, the replacement of these

with more complex relationships.17

16 Tanya Aalberts ‘Misrecognition and the Aporia of the Family of Nations’ (this

SI, 2018); Holm and Sending (this SI, 2018); Lindemann (this SI, 2018).

17 I am not a historian of Ghana and I draw therefore on the historical accounts of

others to support my broader theoretical and methodological argument. Many of

these accounts fit within a complex ideological topography. Ghana, the first

African country to become independent, was a magnet for an early generation of

Africanist scholars who, as Jeffrey Ahlman writes in a recent account of the

period, were drawn into an ideological ‘tug-of-war’ cast either as a ‘struggle

between the “modern and the “traditional”, in the case of modernization-minded

figures… or as one of revolutionary versus reactionary’. (Jeffrey S Ahlman Living

with Nkrumahism: nation, state and pan-Africanism in Ghana (Ohio: Ohio

9

A Kleinian reading of recognition18

University Press, 2017) p. 10). Academic accounts always fall within the

particular ideological bent of their authors, but those of this period of early

African independence are particularly ideological – indeed, many academics

became part of the political landscape themselves, acting as advisors or

sympathetic cheerleaders for Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party (CPP).

It is interesting in the context of the argument presented in this article that

Ghanaian politics was at the time seen as so clearly dichotomised – and this is a

trend that continues, notably with Ali Mazrui’s description of ‘positive’ and

‘negative’ Nkrumahism. Ali Mazrui Nkrumah’s legacy and Africa’s triple heritage

between globalisation and counter-terrorism (Accra, 2004).

18 Unlike her contemporary, Jacques Lacan, Klein does not draw on Hegel and

neither as far as I am aware, do any of her followers. The connections between

Klein and Hegel made in this article are mine and build on earlier work: Julia

10

Recognition, understood within a Kleinian reading of Hegel, is fractious and

unstable, built on a struggle between desires for oneness with and separation

from an other. Recognition is thus already underpinned by inherent instability,

rooted in mutual dependence and an acknowledgement of radical separation.

When Epstein et al talk of the inevitable failure of struggles for recognition,19 I

see this failure stemming from the impossibility of achieving anything more than

glimpses of recognition, snatched moments of a precarious balance between two

inevitably contradictory conditions. Hegel captures the fraught nature of this

ongoing process of seeking recognition in his discussion of the way in which

relationships of love within the family – the prototype of all relationships –

continue to be shaped by dialectically opposed desires of wanting to be the other

and asserting radical separation from the other.

Gallagher, Zimbabwe’s International Relations: fantasy and reality in the making

of the state (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017); Julia Gallagher,

‘Creating a State: a Kleinian reading of recognition in Zimbabwe’s regional

relationships’, European Journal of International Relations: DOI:

10.1177/1354066115588204, 2015, pp. 1-24. In fact, Klein’s work has rarely

been applied to political and social questions, possibly because she did virtually

nothing in these directions herself, choosing to keep her ideas in their clinical

context. For two notable exceptions see: Hanna Segal, Psychoanalysis, Literature

and War: papers 1972-1995 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997); C. Fred Alford,

Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: an account of politics, art and reason

based on her psychoanalytic theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

19 Epstein et al (this SI, 2018).

11

The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be an independent person

in my own right and that, if I were, I would feel deficient and incomplete.

The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I gain

recognition in this person, who in turn gains recognition in me. Love is

therefore the most immense contradiction.20

This is why recognition is precarious and challenging, and inevitably frustrated.

Subjects are frequently too fragile to cope with such demanding tensions: the

balance fails, recognition capsizes and misrecognition ensues. This is why

misrecognition is such an enduring feature, even of the most robust and mature

relationships. And given that, as both Hegel and Klein assert, subjectivity rests on

the ability to recognise and be recognised by others, it explains why and how

subjectivity comes under pressure, driving the continued search for ‘real

recognition’. Selfhood rests on shaky foundations.

There are two reasons for using Klein to read Hegel on recognition. The first is to

help us understand Hegel more easily. Hegel can be difficult to grasp as his

description of the person who has not yet achieved self-consciousness as

‘abstract’ is abstract in itself. In Hegel’s dialectic, the ‘abstract’ only begins to

construct itself through engagement with its ‘negative’ and is thus able to move

20 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by

Allen W. Wood, translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991) p. 199.

12

towards the ‘concrete’.21 Klein, who used clinical work with individual patients

to develop a theory of infant ego-development, is much more graphic in her

description of the pre-conscious position as ‘schizoid-paranoid’ or fragmented.

In this fragmented (for Hegel, abstract) state, a new-born is overwhelmed by

instinctive drives and lacks the ability to organise, to construct herself as a

coherent, thinking, acting being. The person is ‘in bits’, ruled by appetites,

without an understanding of herself as separate from the things she experiences

in the world around her. Through ‘reality-testing’ (Hegel’s struggles for

recognition) with external objects in the outside world (Hegel’s negative), she

begins to put her internal part-objects together. She begins to build an ego (self-

consciousness), which is a way to organise herself and mediate her engagement

with the world around her. Klein gives us a description of the concrete

experience of self-construction.

Second, Klein’s more graphic account doesn’t just make Hegel more graspable; it

gives us a way to understand how selfhood is constructed through

misrecognition too – something he is less clear on. Klein understands different

registers of engagement with the wider world. Some are rooted in idealisation, in

which we engage with external objects we have created by projecting our own

fragmented internal objects. We split these into purely good and bad objects as a

way to enable us to defend against being overwhelmed by ourselves and our

world. This world we create/encounter feeds omnipotence fantasies by

21 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Sprit, translated by A. V.

Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

13

conforming to our inner world and appearing subject to our control. Our

‘relationship’ to it is one of misrecognition because through it we maintain

fantasies of independence and control. But other kinds of engagement emerge as

our ego gains strength, and in these we glimpse more complex external others

that begin to shape our own internal objects, forcing them to shift and adjust. We

lose omnipotence; we realise mutual dependence; we allow ourselves to

understand the world as separate and other. These more mature relationships

are rooted in what Hegel calls recognition.

I will not rehearse the reading of Hegel and misrecognition which is dealt with in

detail elsewhere in this SI.22 But I will provide some more detail on Klein’s ideas,

and attempt to show further how these can be read alongside Hegel to produce a

way to see how misrecognition works in the formation of subjectivity.

A Kleinian approach to misrecognition posits it as precursor, constitutive of, but

also destructive of, recognition. The difference between recognition and

misrecognition can be seen in the various ways infants and young children relate

to the objects in the world around them. According to Klein, desires for oneness

and separation originate in innate life and death instincts. In early life, these

threaten to overwhelm the infant who is barely aware of herself as an entity, and

unable to separate internal from external objects. As a defensive mechanism, the

22 Epstein et al (this SI, 2018); Epstein (this SI, 2018).

14

infant projects her desires onto external objects23 where they are experienced as

completely separate from each other – a process Klein calls ‘splitting’.24 The

world appears to be a collection of part objects, wholly defined by internal

drives, and split in very idealised ways – wholly good and wholly bad. In these

early stages of ego-formation, unbearable aggressive emotions are projected

onto external objects in particularly violent ways. Klein argues that infants

fantasise about tearing and biting objects into bits.25 At the same time, idealised

‘good’ emotions are projected onto external objects which are experienced as

perfectly loving. In this way, the infant creates an ideal world for itself in which

‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects are experienced as completely separate – it is, Klein

argues, a defence against the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’ of early life.26

23 Hegel says recognition is achieved through relations with objects (things) and

subjects (people). Klein talks only of objects, but she means both things and

people, and, as for Hegel, it is the latter that offer the best prospects for self-

realisation. This is because people push back.

24 Melanie Klein, 'Notes on some Schizoid Mechanisms’, Envy and Gratitude and

other works, 1946-1963 (London: Vintage, 1997a), pp. 1–24.

25 Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (London: Karnac

Books, 2006)

26 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’, Love, Guilt and Reparation and

other works, 1921-1945 (London: Vintage, 1998a), pp. 306–43. Klein’s depiction

of the ‘good breast’ and ‘bad breast’ describes this fracturing of external objects,

wherein the same object – here the mother – is sometimes experienced as wholly

good and loving, and sometimes as wholly bad and destructive. Melanie Klein,

15

The misrecognition of external objects establishes a profound self-

misrecognition. The subject feels in command of itself and its world. In her

article in this SI, Epstein discusses the ‘fantasy of sovereignty’ as described by

Lacan in his exposition of the Mirror Stage in an infant’s life.27 As for Lacan, for

Klein the fantasy is necessary to get a grip on the internal chaos the infant

experiences. But ultimately it must be debunked if the infant is to begin to

develop a more grounded ego rooted in acknowledgement of misrecognition and

the move towards struggles for recognition – both of itself and the wider world.

This comes about inevitably because the object relating works both ways.

External objects encountered in the world are taken in (introjected) to help

constitute the infant. This is the mechanism of object-relations, and the exchange

of objects through projection and introjection is the basis for the gradual

emergence of the ego.28 A trying out of our internally-shaped frameworks in the

world, something like a constant assessment of the world within ready-made

frames of reference, becomes a form of reality-testing.29 Their introjection

‘Envy and Gratitude’ in Envy and Gratitude and other works, 1946-1963

(London: Vintage, 1997d), pp. 176–235.

27 Epstein (this SI, 2018).

28 Melanie Klein, 'On Identification' (1955), Envy and Gratitude and other works,

1946-1963 (London: Vintage, 1997b), pp. 141–75.

29 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (Volume Two): Separation, Anxiety and

Anger (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

16

supports the internal objects, reinforcing a sense of their solidity.30 The

interaction between introjection and projection ‘both builds up the internal

world and shapes the picture of external reality’, and so the two are

interdependent.31 As their egos emerge, people learn to recognise and

acknowledge their own aggression and to engage with the world more

reflectively. They begin to recognise ambiguity in it – that objects are both good

and bad – reflecting and helping them build their own more complex internal

objects. Here then we have a sense of progression from an early period of

misrecognition, both of the external world and of the self, which gives way to

possibilities of recognition as the ego emerges and strengthens.

Splitting and projecting is not only a defensive mechanism, but a creative process

without which selfhood cannot emerge. Winnicott (who trained under Klein)

discusses it in terms of ‘playing’, the way in which we shape the world around

our own fantasies. ‘It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or

adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in

being creative that the individual discovers the self’.32 Yet in this early stage of

ego-development, recognition is a long way off, since the ‘other’ is essentially a

creation of the self. Recognition really begins to emerge when we supplement

30 Klein (1997a).

31 Klein (1997b), p. 141.

32 Donald Winnicott, 'The use of an object and relating through

identifications', Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), pp.

86–94; p. 54.

17

play and fantasy in our engagement with the real world, when we allow our

‘play’ objects to be tested by reality. This amounts to an acceptance that not only

does the subject shape her objects, but the objects shape her. This stage is full of

pain and stress because relinquishing the fantasy of omnipotence and the

glamour of self-idealisation undoes where we thought we had got to with our

selfhood. It becomes clear that what we recognised as ourselves in relation to

our others was built on a fantasy. Klein describes this as the ‘depressive position’

in which the subject realises her weakness and her hatred for loved objects

which are now accepted as part of whole, ambiguous objects. As the subject

confronts the loss of the ideal and of her omnipotence, she experiences despair

and loneliness.33

The point to draw from this is that at the moment at which the ego is fragile,

fantasy and ‘play’ are particularly crucial for the establishment of selfhood. It is

only as the ego becomes stronger that a more painful engagement with the world

on its terms is really possible. This suggests that early engagement with the

world is necessarily dominated by forms of ‘misrecognition’, the tendency to see

and shape the world in one’s own (also misrecognised) image, through processes

of splitting and projecting. Misrecognition is thus a vital part of the emergence of

selfhood, but ultimately it must also make room for a more troubling search for

recognition through which we accept separation from and dependence on other

subjects. However, we never leave misrecognition behind: Klein is clear that

33 Melanie Klein, 'On the sense of loneliness', Envy and Gratitude and other

works 1946-1963 (London: Vintage, 1997c), pp. 300–13; p. 305.

18

defensive splitting mechanisms remain an important characteristic of

relationships, particularly in times of anxiety.34 Indeed, given the instability of

recognition itself, anxiety is never banished – Kristeva describes this as the

inevitability of ‘psychic anxiety’.35 Because of this, misrecognition can be seen to

be both a precursor to recognition, a component, and also a continual disturber

of it.

Scaling up: from infant to ‘infant-state’

The Klein-Hegel framework gives us a series of three steps which I am going to

use to understand Ghana under Nkrumah. The first is the incoherence

experienced at birth, and the overwhelming anxiety caused by the lack of an ego

able to regulate internal chaos. The second is the creation of split objects,

projected onto the world and encountered as external idealised objects, part of

early attempts to establish selfhood. And the third is the breakdown of these

objects under the encounter with substantial external objects that push back.

This breakdown undermines selfhood premised on misrecognition but also lays

the foundations for possibilities of recognition and a more robust selfhood.

Before I do this I must address the tricky questions of scaling. How can I use

ideas about the emergence of the individual’s ego to understand the creation of

34 Melanie Klein, ‘Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states’ in Love,

Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945 (London: Vintage, 1998b):

344–69

35 Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

19

Ghana – something of a big jump? There are two problems here. The first is to

treat African states as infants, at best patronising and at worst potentially

playing into modernisation discourses that have described African countries as

‘growing up’ to become more like European ‘adult’ or ‘developed’ states. And the

second is IR’s perennial problem of translating ideas about individuals onto

states.

In relation to the first problem, there has been a powerful strand in thinking

about the way African statehood emerged that talked about ‘growing up’ and

‘maturing’ (many Africanists used such terms themselves around the time of

independence and it was a major preoccupation of Nkrumah himself).36 Rostow’s

modernisation model that was popular at the time understands the emergence of

the new states in such terms and more recent ideas also set African states as

‘behind’ on a trajectory of progress.37 These modernisation theses tend to see

36 Saburi Oladeni Biobaku, Secretary to the Premier, Western Region, Nigeria

wrote: ‘We think it a matter of the highest priority to develop our people and our

resources, to “modernize” in the phraseology of Professor Rostow; when we

achieve this we shall invest the African personality with a potency that is bound

to be respected everywhere, and our influence in the community of nations will

be real, not superficial.’ Saburi Oladeni Biobaku, ‘Comments’ in American Society

of African Culture (ed), Pan-Africanism Reconsidered (Berkley: University of

California Press, 1962), pp. 129–32; p. 131.

37 Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (London: Cambridge University

Press, 1962), and for a more recent example of this logic see Robert Cooper, The

20

states growing up by a process of adjusting to an external model through

emulation. The ‘backward’ African condition is remedied through adoption of

‘modern’ Western methods and norms. This is not how I understand the process

of state self-realisation. According to my Hegel-Klein framing, emulation has

nothing to do with the emergence of subjectivity, since with emulation the new

‘subject’ remains dependent on its object, slavishly bound into copying it until it

achieves sameness. For our purposes here, a dynamic struggle between wanting

to be and rejecting the other lies at the heart of the emergence of subjectivity.

The internal contradictions that imbue it make the process of ‘becoming’

provisional and cyclical at best. While I have suggested that there is a difference

between misrecognition found in the paranoid-schizoid position and unstable

recognition found in the depressive position, and I have even called the latter a

‘mature’ form of relationship, I have been careful to point out that adults too

respond to anxiety by employing strategies of misrecognition. For this approach,

subjects continue to be formed through relationships throughout life –

subjectivity is not a goal that has been achieved by some and still eludes others.

Recognition can be seen as a driver of this process, something continuously

pursued but never achieved.38 I therefore want to be very clear that when I talk

about the idea of an ‘infant’ Ghanaian state and the ‘development’ of statehood, I

do so within this understanding of relationships as dynamic, contested and

unsettled, not a modernisation framing. Ghana here provides a way to explore

Breaking of Nations: Order and chaos in the twenty-first century (London:

Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

38 Gallagher (2017); Epstein et al (this SI, 2018).

21

processes of achieving state-subjectivity that all states experience and fail to

experience.

The second problem – about how to use ideas about individuals to understand

states – is a perennial one for IR.39 There are various ways of addressing it. Hegel

gives us a starting point, in his understanding of the dialectic being inherent at

various levels – as Epstein et al point out, Hegel saw the master-slave dialectic

within the individual, and between individuals, each mediating the other.40

Already underpinning this discussion is the notion that interpersonal

relationships resonate with internal psychic processes, an idea that Klein also

explores explicitly in discussions about the relationships between objects.41

Scaling up further one might point to work on the way groups underwrite

individual subjectivity and wellbeing.42 The degree to which a group of which

one is a member is able to assert itself and to elicit recognition in the world, is an

essential source of individual stability and coherence. There is work on

recognition in IR that already explores this – most notably Greenhill and

Neumann who each discuss the ways in which one group’s relationship to other

groups helps support its members’ sense of themselves as distinct from and

39 Alexander Wendt, ‘The State as a Person in International Theory’ Review of

International Studies 30 (2004), pp. 289–316.

40 Epstein et al (this SI, 2018).

41 Klein (1998a)

42 Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups and other Papers, (London: Tavistock

Publications, 1974).

22

related to other groups through relationships of recognition.43 Group – or state –

subjectivity emerges in this way, an idea explored for example in the struggle for

recognition of minority groups.44

A further way to address it might be to think about how individual leaders of

groups embody and express the collective – how in their performance of it, they

bring into being a collective consciousness. This is particularly apposite to

understanding how post-colonial states become reified in their early years, as

they rely heavily on their heads of state speaking and enacting statehood.45

Nkrumah, like many post-independence leaders, took on a particularly important

role in the absence of established state and broader institutions. In articulating

and enacting what Ghana was, Nkrumah was able to birth his state's self-

consciousness by performing it.46

43 Greenhill (2008); Iver Neumann, Uses of the Other In World Politics

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

44 For an overview see Amy Gutman (ed), Multiculturalism: examining the

politics of recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

45 Wallerstein, for example, argues that new states don’t have the ‘residual

loyalty’ of citizens and need a dominant party and a charismatic leader to

embody and enact unity. Immanuel Wallerstein (1961), Africa, the Politics of

Independence (New York, Random House), p. 87.

46 Apter describes Nkrumah acting as the 'nucleus of unity’ for Ghana as it

attempted to create new institutions and abolish old ones. David Apter, Ghana in

Transition (New York, Atheneum), p. 274. Kwaku Larbi Korang, in a fascinating

23

In exploring the words and deeds of its leader, I hope to explain the emergence

of a new state. Most of the rest of the article discusses Nkrumah’s ideas from his

key text, Africa Must Unite, published in 1963, a passionate and ‘most cogent’47

call for pan-Africanism.48 As we have seen, Nkrumah described his powerful

sense of Ghana as a ‘new entity’, a fragile, new-born state, at its independence. It

might have been useful for Nkrumah to portray it in this way – to write off the

pre-colonial history that he saw as rather backward and irrelevant to modern

statehood, along with the legacies of a racist colonial state – but there was also

undeniably a substantive issue of Ghana as a new country that had both to

understand its new selfhood, and become an actor in the world – to achieve ‘self-

discussion of Nkrumah’s depiction of his early life, shows how he portrayed

himself as both embodiment and enabler of the emergence of Ghana as a ‘self-

nation in a universal modernity that still kept faith with its own nature’. Kwaku

Larbi Korang, Writing Ghana, imagining Africa: nation and African modernity

(Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2004).

47 Ama Biney ‘The Legacy of Kwame Nkrumah in Retrospect’ The Journal of Pan

African Studies 2:3, 2008, pp. 129-59, p. 136

48 Nkrumah read widely and wrote prolifically during his time in power.

Although some of his writing was achieved in collaboration and written by

others, the ideas in his books were clearly his. On Nkrumah’s writings and

thought, see: Biney (2011) and Immanuel Wallerstein ‘Implicit Ideology in

Africa: a review of books by Kwame Nkrumah’ The Journal of Conflict Resolution

11:4, 1967, pp. 518-22; p. 519.

24

consciousness’ and agency. Nkrumah describes this problem very clearly, and

addresses it by weaving together the international and the domestic in an

attempt to bring about a Ghanaian identity.

A new African state

Nkrumah published Africa must Unite in 1963, 11 years after he became prime

minister under the transition from British rule, and six years after independence.

This far into his rule and only three years from his own fall, one cannot help

feeling that much of his description of domestic Ghana is built on an appreciation

of the real mess the country was getting into,49 and reflects too the fact that

Nkrumah was by this time quite obviously turning to international affairs for

relief.50 In it, he describes the first years of a fragile new state. Nkrumah puts

international relationships at the centre of his understanding of Ghanaian

statehood. How far and in what ways these constitute relationships of

recognition is a question I will come to later. In this section I discuss Nkrumah’s

description of Ghana at independence and think through how far it might be

characterised as ‘paranoid-schizoid’ or ‘pre-subjective’.

49 For a detailed account of Ghana’s decline under Nkrumah, see Roger Gocking,

The History of Ghana (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005).

50 David Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah: the political kingdom in the Third World

(London: I B Tauris, 1988). Nkrumah’s drive towards centralised control can also

be read in the context of his increasingly narrow options in the face of economic

crisis. Birmingham (1998).

25

Nkrumah’s understanding of an infant Ghana emerges through descriptions of

Ghanaians as immature and of Ghana as fractured and unintegrated. The

language he uses paints Ghana as chaotic and schizoid. His main preoccupation is

how to create a centralised state that can put it all together. I suggest that

Nkrumah describes the state as the nation’s ego, emerging to contain and make

sense of its messy incoherence.

We have seen already how Nkrumah describes a ‘denuded’ state without

‘bearings’.51 It was not only the removal of traces of colonial administration that

created this ‘discontinuity’, but the powerful sense that Ghanaian people were

themselves disconnected from the modern world, incapable of modern

subjecthood. He wrote:

Tribal society, counting little but sunrise, sunset and the moon’s apogee,

welcomed these festive breaks in the monotony of passing days, and has

carried over the customs to the present, where another more stirring

philosophy needs to induce industriousness and thrift.52

Unlike other African nationalist leaders (Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika, for

example), he was not interested in restoring lost African virtues: here, he viewed

51 Nkrumah (1998) p. xiv.

52 Nkrumah (1998) p. 105.

26

the modernisation of his subjects as essential.53 The people, he argues ‘have to be

completely reanimated’.54 This idea of a death- or zombie-like state invokes an

eerie, resonant emptiness. In Nkrumah’s description, the people are immersed,

dream-like, in a pre-modern state of nature, mechanically rather than actively

responsive to the rhythms of the moon and the sun, while Nkrumah himself

appears to be the only one awake, bent on giving them consciousness.

Ghana was of course not empty, and not without a history, not least in its colonial

past. But this was an uncomfortable legacy. Elsewhere, Nkrumah describes it as

leaving Ghanaians troubled and uncertain, disconnected from their roots, forced

into copying an identity that was not theirs.55

The country’s identity crisis was underlined by what Nkrumah saw as its internal

fragmentation. This anxiety was not just Nkrumah’s: the idea of the new African

countries in chaotic pieces was a favourite theme of academics and statesmen at

53 Nyerere writes of a natural African socialism and advocates its revival rather

than a turn to Western forms. Julius K. Nyerere, Ujamaa: essays on socialism (Dar

es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968). Nkrumah was less emphatically anti-

tradition in some of his later work, arguing for a ‘scientific working out’ of

traditional forms of African egalitarianism. Kwame Nkrumah, ‘African Socialism

Revisited’ in Africa: National and Social Revolution (Prague: Peace and Socialism

Publishers, 1967).

54 Nkrumah (1998) p. 107.

55 Kwame Nkrumah (1964).

27

the time. Zolberg described them as ‘syncretic’ and liable to violent fracture;56

Marcum as fragmented into a ‘host of petty states’, threatened by internal

‘centrifugal forces’ and ‘particularlist loyalties’;57 and later Mamdani called them

‘bifurcated’, comprising members with entirely different conceptions of the state

and their relation to it.58 It was generally assumed at African independence that

the divisive legacies of colonialism, along with the stresses of containing ethnic

pluralities within straightened economic circumstances, would put enormous

strain on states with feeble capacities, and that division, conflict and

fragmentation were inevitable. Such primordial forces presented the new states

with a mess of contradictory drives that threatened to undo their ambitions to

both represent and act for all the people – to establish a collective subject-hood.

Nkrumah certainly appears to feel their challenge to state authority. He

describes division as one of his biggest threats. The British he argues, had sewn

the germs of disunity in their parting constitutional arrangements that enshrined

a devolution of powers. These protected the power of regional chiefs who were

bent on frustrating the government’s modernisation programme. The opposition

56 Aristide Zolberg, ‘The structure of political conflict in the new states of tropical

Africa’ American Political Science Review LXII:1, 1968, pp. 70–87.

57 John Marcum ‘Pan-Africanism: present and future’ in American Society of

African Culture (ed) Pan-Africanism Reconsidered (Berkley: University of

California Press, 1962), pp. 53-65; p. 53–4.

58 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy

of later colonialism (London, James Currey, 1996).

28

parties, he believed, were ‘narrowly regional in concept, and often violent,

abusive and terroristic in action’,59 the immature population ‘amenable to

demagogic appeals and readily exploitable by eloquence that arouses the

emotions rather than reason’.60 The ground, he says, ‘was well laid for the

promotion of disunity and fragmentation’.61 He concludes: ‘We were engaged in a

kind of war, a war against poverty and disease, against ignorance, against

tribalism and disunity. We were fighting to construct.’62

Nkrumah’s understanding of the role of the new state then was to turn a

fragmented, chaotic and undeveloped country into a coherent whole. Here the

state begins to look like the country’s fragile ego, attempting to establish stability

and coherence in a struggle against confusion. And, much in the way Klein

describes the work in this direction done by an individual’s fragile ego,

coherence is constructed around a rigid, idealised sense of a unitary, omnipotent

selfhood. Nkrumah set about his task by trying to establish a centralised

economy and political system.63 ‘Our over-all planning,’ he writes, ‘will be

59 Nkrumah (1998) p. 68.

60 Nkrumah (1998) p. 72.

61 Nkrumah (1998) p. 62.

62 Nkrumah (1998) p. 74.

63 Maxwell Owusu, Uses and Abuses of Political Power: a case study of continuity

and change in the politics of Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Here, Nkrumah was adopting the prevailing economic philosophy of the day – in

Africa and beyond. A centralised economy focused on industrial growth, was the

29

designed to unify and discipline economic activity… Control from the top must

ensure that individual executives and administrators do not misinterpret policy

and instructions and break out of the co-ordinated pattern with the introduction

of improvised schemes.’64 The result would be a country of complete unity, a

country in which the ‘aspirations of the people and the economic and social

objectives of the government are synonymous’65 while the trade unions’ aims are

‘identified with those of the government’, something that ‘weds them to active

participation in the carrying out of the government’s programme’.66

On one level, this rhetoric was an attempt by Nkrumah to justify his moves to

centralise power, to crack down on the opposition and media, and to ‘reform’ the

power of the chiefs (‘crush’ might be a more appropriate word, according to

Rathbone).67 Many African post-independence governments used such

arguments to institute one-party states or to wage war against secessionist or

dissatisfied factions. Yet from beneath the practical, materially-focused drive for

unity, comes an anxiety that provides a different angle on Nkrumah’s rigid

norm in the 1960s and pursued by socialist and capitalist African regimes alike.

See Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds), International Development and

the Social Sciences (Berkley: University of California Press, 1991).

64 Nkrumah (1998) p. 122.

65 Nkrumah (1998) p. 126.

66 Nkrumah (1998) p. 126–7.

67 Richard Rathbone, Nkrumah and the Chiefs: the politics of chieftancy in Ghana

1951-60 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000).

30

insistence on conformity. Austin makes an interesting point that Nkrumah had

an ‘extreme emotional attitude to power’, which he translated into an ‘Nkrumaist

cult’. In this way he was able to portray his call for centralisation as a popular

cause.68 Nkrumah paints a vivid picture of what a new-born state feels like – and

the picture is a topsy-turvy one of internal fragmentation, alienation and dubious

collective selfhood. He could describe the role of the state as the force that would

pull it together, create the selfhood that would establish Ghana’s ‘dignity,

progress and prosperity’.69 In such circumstances, a centralised state, with

unambiguous objects and whose constituent parts worked harmoniously

together, appears to protect against the anxieties both for the future of the

country and those living in it.

The allure of a heavily centralised state that could hold it all together went

beyond elites. This was evidenced in Ghana in Nkrumah’s enormous electoral

popularity in the early years,70 but it proved to be a feature of most newly-

emerging African states as they reached independence.71 Here we can point to

68 Dennis Austin (1964) Politics in Ghana 1946-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University

Press) p. 41.

69 Nkrumah (1998) p. 221.

70 Apter (1968).

71 Dorman, for example, writes of a very similar tendency in Zimbabwe,

achieving independence more than 20 years after Ghana, where a variety of civil

society groups worked alongside the government to suppress division and

dissent in the interests of the unity of the new nation. Sara Dorman,

31

Klein’s argument about the role of omnipotence fantasies in providing

reassurance in the paranoid-schizoid state. Surrounded by anxiety and

fragmentation, a firm central figure, utterly in control, provides a sense of

stability, no matter how ephemeral and weakly rooted. Apter gives us a powerful

sense of how Nkrumah used his charisma to contain anxiety: ‘For each group,

Nkrumah could make things “all right”... His charisma became a vessel into which

all authority flowed.’72 For Boateng, Nkrumah’s charismatic persona was built on

implicit comparisons with Jesus.73

Relationships with the wider world

Here, I am going to discuss how Nkrumah achieved his picture of coherence and

stability through his international relationships. This is a story in which the

fantasy of internal consistence and control are played out in the wider world;

idealised internal objects are split and projected onto external objects that now

appear to conform to Nkrumah’s own certainties.

The domestic scene in Ghana was, by 1963, far from coherent and stable and as

Rooney puts it: ‘As local political problems mounted, the party apparatus

Understanding Zimbabwe: from liberation to authoritarianism (London: Hurst,

2016).

72 Apter (1968), p. 779.

73 Charles Adom Boateng, The Political Legacy of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana

(Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003) pp. 8-11.

32

stressed [Nkrumah’s] role as a great African leader.’74 In other words, Nkrumah

attempted to pull fractured Ghana together through his international policies.

However, the enormous gap between domestic chaos and international fantasy

could only be bridged through an adventurous creativity. Nkrumah was an

enormously charismatic figure and an object of popular hero-worship,

something that is both described and embodied in the work of his assistant and

biographer June Milne.75 His vision of Ghana, which he frequently depicted

through its international relationships, and most powerfully in his pursuit of a

united Africa, highlights his huge talent for political vision and rhetoric.

According to Wallerstein, this vision encapsulated an ideology shared across

most of the African intelligentsia at the time.76

We are looking at a fantasised Ghana constructed through misrecognition; of

Ghana’s imagined friends and enemies, and how these ultimately feed back into

Ghana’s sense of itself. The misrecognition of external objects is inseparable

from a misrecognised self and this is because these external objects emerge from

flattened idealised internal objects that have been split apart and projected in

order to establish a sense of certainty and control. In Africa must Unite, Nkrumah

argues for two types of relationship for African countries: those with the West,

74 Rooney (1988).

75 June Milne, Kwame Nkrumah – a biography (London: Panaf, 2000)

76 Wallerstein (1967); see also Joseph G Amamoo, The Ghanaian Revolution

(London: Jafint Co Publishers, 1988).

.

33

and those with each other. These relationships are polarised – they are ‘split’ in

Kleinian terminology: the first is with a dangerous and aggressive other, and the

second is with an ideal non-other. These are unambiguous relationships offering

a stark dichotomy of actors in Ghana’s wider world.77

The relationship with the West – particularly the former colonial power – must

be one of complete repudiation. Nkrumah wrote his book before Fanon’s work

was translated into English,78 but he similarly traces ideas about the need to fight

back (albeit non-violently) against colonial subjection in order to assert

selfhood.79 In the economic sphere, African economies had been designed to

77 The argument that these were idealised by Nkrumah – that I make below –

does not mean there was no substance to his perceptions of international friends

and enemies. Ghana’s fragile economy was, like many other African economies,

too small and too focused on its colonial dependence to have much hope of

making it without substantial pan-African cooperation. Likewise, Nkrumah’s

analysis of a malevolent West was rooted in the fact of Cold War anxieties and

heavy-handed or illegal interventions in new states that were thought to be

going the ‘wrong way’ ideologically.

78 Franz Fanon’s book, Black Skin, White Masks was published in French in 1952,

and in English in 1967. His, The Wretched of the Earth in French in 1961 and in

English in 1963.

79 Nkrumah was similar to Fanon in that he ‘advocated for a theory of

decolonisation rooted in a dialectic of destruction and rebirth’. Ahlman (2017) p.

11.

34

service European needs, and the world’s markets were stacked to maintain

dependent relationships. Like many of his contemporaries, Nkrumah argues for

self-sufficiency – autonomy – from the West if African states are to achieve

economic viability. Politically, too, he argues against some of his Francophone

colleagues who were entering independence while maintaining close ties to

France.80 Such a state of affairs will not, he argues, deliver true independence to

Africa. He sees a ‘Machiavellian danger’ in the Western powers,81 arguing that a

total break with Europe is essential to help Africans establish material,

ideological and emotional independence.

The superpowers, he argues, are ‘seeking to make Africa a warground of

contending interests’ and the Europeans, through the creation of trade zones, are

‘planning our balkanization’.82 He warns against the lure of the European

Development Fund.83 It is inadequate for the industrialisation needs of Africa,

80 The former French colonies were vigorously wooed by Charles de Gaulle.

Nkrumah’s references to ‘balkanisation’ were made in answer to de Gaulle’s

breaking up of French west Africa, and his plans to keep French-speaking

colonies under close French patronage after independence. See Birmingham

(1998).

81 Nkrumah (1998) p. 193.

82 Nkrumah (1998) p. 193.

83 ‘Created in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome and launched in 1959, the European

Development Fund (EDF) is the EU's main instrument for providing

35

and amounts to a ‘special plea for collective colonialism of a new order’.84 Better

to create economic independence. Nkrumah’s greatest anxiety is that ‘the

imperialist powers, fishing in the muddy waters of communalism, tribalism and

sectional interests, endeavour to create fissions in the national front, in order to

achieve fragmentation’.85 The danger of engagement with the West, therefore, is

one of exacerbated internal fracture and division.

In this, Nkrumah presents a clear connection between disruptive division

internally – bad internal objects – and disruptive external forces – bad external

objects. He links these objects together as a way to explain, and jettison, messy

ambiguity at home: it is now all identified with a malevolent West. Ghana, and all

Africa, can only clear the ‘muddy waters’ by cutting itself off. The mud itself is

dissipated through this projection: stuck now to the West, it can be seen more

clearly and apparently dealt with more straightforwardly. Nkrumah’s fantasy of

complete autonomy from the West rang hollow, as we shall see later. But as a

signifier of the sense of control and independent statehood it was exemplary.

development aid to African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and to

overseas countries and territories (OCTs).’

(www.ec.europa.eu/europeaid/funding/funding-instruments-

programming/funding-instruments/european-development-fund_en – cited 15

February 2017).

84 Nkrumah (1998) p. 160.

85 Nkrumah (1998) p. 173.

36

But equally important for Nkrumah, and the cause around which he constructed

a powerful idealisation, was a completely different type of relationship,

embodied in the idea of pan-Africanism.86 Here, instead of a relationship of total

rejection, we see a relationship of complete submersion, in which Ghana is part

of ‘a glorious tree of union and brotherhood among the peoples of Africa’.87

Pan-Africanism as an intellectual tradition began in the African-American and

Caribbean diaspora in the early 20th century, and focused on the idea of a

reclamation of African identity for people who had been uprooted and deprived

of selfhood. Edward Blyden’s ‘Back to Black’, an early articulation, expressed the

idea of an essential common African identity ‘forged in the common experience

of racism’.88 According to Raymond Suttner, other pan-Africanists looked further

back, proposing that the ‘oneness’ amongst all people of African descent, related

‘to the alleged intrinsic character of the African spirit… based on an “imaginary

consensus” that is claimed to have prevailed in Africa prior to conquest’.89 This

86 Gocking (2005).

87 Nkrumah (1998) p. 86.

88 Mcebisi Ndletyana (2014) ‘Pan Africanism in South Africa: confluence of local

origin and diasporic inspiration’, Peter Vale, Lawrence Hamilton and Estelle

Prinsloo (eds) Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: ideas, individuals and

institutions (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014): pp.

146–72

89 Raymond Suttner, ‘African Nationalism’ in Vale et al (2014), pp. 121–45; pp.

136–7.

37

idea was embodied in the ‘African personality’ that Africans had been deprived

of through slavery and colonialism.90 It was sometimes equated with African

philosophies about the individual’s embeddedness in the whole: ‘Man become

integral parts of one other (sic). The group, no longer a collection of entities, is

substantively interrelated.’91 Africans’ ‘return’ was often literal too – Marcus

Garvey, whose influence was at its height in the 1920s and 1930s, advocated the

‘Back to Africa’ movement, promoted through the practical means of the Black

Star Shipping Company which he helped establish. African-Americans could

‘return home’ to Liberia and Ethiopia (the uncolonised parts of Africa at the

time).

From America and the Caribbean, no doubt, for people whose ancestors had

been violently removed from their context, Africa could look like an

undifferentiated mass. Blackness and an origin in Africa were what united the

proponents of pan-Africanism. ‘Africa’ was a fantasy homeland, an ideal

alternative to the violent and unwelcoming Americas. Nkrumah and other

nationalist African leaders who studied in the US and Europe in the 1940s and

1950s engaged with these ideas – perhaps also seeing ‘Africa’ in a new light from

the position of a homesick migrant. The idea also provided them with a powerful

90 Alioune Diop, ‘Remarks on African personality and negritude’, American

Society of African Culture (ed) Pan-Africanism Reconsidered (Berkley: University

of California Press, 1962), pp. 327–45.

91 George E. Carter, ‘Traditional African Social Thought’, American Society of

African Culture, 1962, pp. 255–66; p. 261.

38

ideological and political objective, a ‘club’ enabling ‘intimate interaction and

collaboration’.92 Nkrumah became heavily involved in the pan-African movement

in London.93 He came to believe that real independence for African countries was

impossible without continental political union. He saw himself, the leader of the

first African country to achieve independence, at the forefront of this campaign

moving, he hoped, towards a United States of Africa. Copies of Africa must Unite

were handed out to delegates at the meeting to establish the Organisation of

African Unity (OAU) in Addis Adaba in 1963 ‘in the hope that any members who

were not yet convinced of the need for unification would absorb the

overwhelming case for unity by reading the book’.94

Nkrumah’s book is saturated with the themes of African ‘oneness’ and ‘African

personality’. When he talks about his relationships with other African leaders, he

is describing a meeting of minds and ideas, far more than in his descriptions of

domestic relationships. Like the pan-Africanist Americans, he appears to find his

‘home’ in ‘Africa’.

In meeting fellow Africans from all parts of the continent I am constantly

impressed by how much we have in common. It is not just our colonial past,

92 Apter and Coleman (1962), pp. 88–9.

93 Nkrumah was one of the main organisers of the fifth Pan-African Congress in

Manchester in 1945: see Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester

Pan-African Congress Revisited (London: New Beacon Books, 1995).

94 Milne (2000) p. 96.

39

or the fact that we have aims in common, it is something which goes far

deeper. I can best describe it as a sense of one-ness in that we are

Africans.95

As other African states gained independence, Nkrumah began to work for African

union. With his closest allies Guinea and Mali he formed the ‘nucleus of the

United States of Africa’ in 1960, exchanging cabinet ministers with Guinea, and

working on the principles of pan-Africanism that would harmonise foreign,

defence and economic policy and work towards the ‘rehabilitation and

development of African culture’.96 The practical objectives of these policies,

designed to bring about ‘unalloyed unity’,97 would be to eradicate economic

competition and pool resources.

Nkrumah thus translated his desire for Ghanaian unity and harmony onto the

whole continent. His idealised coherent internal object had a corresponding

idealised coherent external object to relate to. With delight he describes how

‘[o]ur conferences have been characterized by an identity of view on most of the

problems examined and an atmosphere of perfect understanding’.98 He writes:

95 Nkrumah (1998) p. 132.

96 Nkrumah (1998) p. 142.

97 Nkrumah (1998) p. 185.

98 Nkrumah (1998) p. 143.

40

To us, Africa with its islands is just one Africa. We reject the idea of any

kind of partition. From Tangier or Cairo in the North to Capetown in the

South, from Cape Guardafui in the East to Cape Verde Islands in the West,

Africa is one and indivisible.99

The realisation of these plans will, he believes, eliminate ‘those acquisitive

tendencies which lead to sectional conflicts within society’,100 and in time be

translated onto the wider international stage:

[A]ll Africa will speak with one concerted voice. With union, our example of

a multiple of peoples living and working for mutual development in amity

and peace will point the way for the smashing of the inter-territorial

barriers existing elsewhere, and give a new meaning to the concept of

human brotherhood. A Union of African States will raise the dignity of

Africa and strengthen its impact on world affairs. It will make possible the

full expression of the African personality.101

Nkrumah is describing the seamless submersion of Ghana into the larger entity

of Africa. He extends his ideas about harmony and unity within Ghana to a

harmony and unity across the continent, whereby every African can feel a

complete oneness with every other African and on this larger stage, he feels he

99 Nkrumah (1998) p. 217.

100 Nkrumah (1998) p. 171.

101 Nkrumah (1998) p. 193.

41

has found it, far more easily than he is managing at home. This is a description of

Hegel’s idea of the desire for complete ‘oneness’ with the other. It is also an

idealised projective identification which posits an Africa entirely shaped in

imagination, one that presents no sense of disturbing difference, but one too that

can apparently represent the united homogenous Ghana he is trying to bring into

being.

Ghanaian statehood, coherent, unified and acting, emerges in Nkrumah’s

conceptualisation as resting on a complete repudiation of a violent aggressive

other; and a complete submersion into an idealised other which is so closely

identified with as to cease being properly other. Nkrumah captured the

uncertainty of the fragile new state in the way he juxtaposes it in relation to

these two extremes which, in Kleinian fashion, represent split internal objects,

projected onto idealised good and bad external objects. But he has also managed

to contain it, to pitch it as ‘concrete’ amidst this array of polarised certainties.

The outside world he has created, built on fantasies of omnipotence, autonomy,

control and perfection is clearly misrecognised. Just as the relationships at home

are deeply fractured and fraught, so Ghana’s international relationships were

more ambiguous. But these fantasies were I think necessary for the fledgling

state. They enabled it to begin to explain itself, both to itself and to the wider

world, to establish an illusion of agency through its ideas about what it was and

its ability to act. Nkrumah’s self-idealisation, linked to these idealised external

objects, also established a profound self-misrecognition of Ghana – as important,

as capable, as powerful. This all came crashing down around him in a few short

42

years, and yet it had set Ghana on the path towards more grounded forms of

recognition.

Misrecognition, recognition and state-making

Nkrumah’s international relationships were not based on recognition which, as

Hegel and Klein suggest, is rooted in a relation with ambiguity. I want to show

now how this misrecognition disintegrated and laid the foundations for more

solid forms of recognition and grounded selfhood.

Nkrumah’s fall was brutal, and hugely popular in Ghana. The announcement of

the coup that ousted him in 1966 was greeted with widespread celebration and

he died in exile in 1972.102 There are many accounts of Nkrumah’s fall and its

causes – domestic and international. Nkrumah himself wrote: ‘The incident in

Ghana is a plot by the imperialists, neo-colonialists and their agents in Africa’.103

Hadjor argues that Nkrumah ‘kept popular support but was brought down by

102 Apter writes of ‘rejoicing in the streets’ at the news of the coup (1968, p. 787)

and how ‘women chalked their faces and wore white in the villages – traditional

symbols of rejoicing’ (1968, p. 767). Gocking writes: ‘The coup itself was

welcomed in Ghana with far more enthusiasm than had been the case for

independence… The bars were jammed with celebrants the night after the coup.’

Gocking (2005) p. 138. For a detailed account of the key actors involved in the

coup, see Simon Baynham, The Military and Politics in Nkrumah’s Ghana

(Boulder: Westview Press, 1988).

103 Kwame Nkrumah, Dark Days in Ghana (London: Panaf Books, 1968), p. 44.

43

selfish party members’ in a ‘CIA-backed army coup’104 and Milne argued that the

coup was a creation of ‘reactionary forces’.105 These fit into Nkrumah’s broader

depiction of the West as the enemy of Ghana, and while there is truth in the

assertion that the West was interested in his fall, there is scant evidence that the

British or Americans were directly involved in the 1966 coup.106

Other accounts are more nuanced, situating Nkrumah’s dramatic fall from grace

within his political failures at home. Feit writes that it was Nkrumah’s failure to

make the state into a Leviathan capable of containing the divisions and

104 Kofi Buenor Hadjor Nkrumah and Ghana: the dilemma of post-colonial power

(London: Kegan Paul International, 1988) p. 87 and p. 99.

105 Milne (2000).

106 First details the ways in which the US and European powers worked to

undermine Nkrumah, and to support the regime that replaced him, but her

account suggests that while they might have hoped for a coup, and supported it

when it occurred, they did not mastermind it. Ruth First, The Barrel of a Gun:

political power in Africa and the coup d’etat in Africa (London: Allen Lane, 1970).

In 1978 a former CIA operative, Johri Stockwell claimed in his book In Search of

Enemies that the CIA was pivotal in the coup. However his account is confused

and unconvincing. I’m inclined to believe, along with Rooney, that the CIA was

clearly ‘well briefed’ on the coup plans, and supportive of them, but ‘they did not

actually set the coup in motion or take part’. Rooney (1988) p. 254. They didn’t

need to. As others have pointed out, the coup didn’t need external direction:

there was plenty of domestic opposition to Nkrumah.

44

alternative power sources that caused the problems. He was easily put aside; his

regime was ‘little more than [a] shadow’.107 Owusu argues that Nkrumah’s

credibility rested on his ability to deliver the economic growth he had promised,

and that as this failed to emerge, he faced overwhelming political pressure.108 By

1963 it was clear that despite huge efforts, the economy was in terrible shape.

Nkrumah’s ambitious and expensive industrialisation projects, designed to

overcome Ghana’s dependence on cocoa exports, were struggling, goods were

scarce, unemployment and prices were rising, and there was a severe balance of

payments crisis.109

107 Edward Feit (1968) 'Military Coups and Political Development: Some Lessons

from Ghana and Nigeria' World Politics, 20:2, pp. 179-193; p. 180.

108 Owusu (1970).

109 There is a large literature on Ghana’s economic misfortunes under Nkrumah.

On Nkrumah’s commitment to ambitious industrialisation schemes, and the

economic and political problems it produced, in particular the Volta River

Project, see Gocking (2005); Stephanie Decker ‘Corporate political activity in less

developed countries: the Volta River Project in Ghana, 1958-66’ Business History

57(7) (2011) pp. 993-1017; and Boateng (2003). Some scholars have criticised

Nkrumah’s ’ambivalence about Western domination of resources’ and weak

implementation rather than bad policy (for example, Harcourt Fuller, Building

the Ghanaian nation-state: Kwame Nkrumah’s symbolic nationalism (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) p. 56). More critical accounts focus on his ‘casualness

and ignorance’ in relation to economics (Trevor Jones, Ghana’s First Republic:

the pursuit of the political kingdom (London: Methuen, 1976) p. 143). For a

45

In his novel The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei

Armah, a critic of the regime, provides a moving account of the rapid decline of

Ghana’s economy under Nkrumah, illustrating the depression that gripped the

country by the mid-1960s.110 Economic crisis caused by the crippling constraints

created by foreign interests and economic mismanagement coupled with rising

unpopularity created by Nkrumah’s repressive domestic measures to curb union

discontent and clamp down on dissidents spread a film of decay and corruption.

Armah’s novel shows the dramatic change from the elation he inspired in his

early speeches, to the quiet despair that emerged later. The novel opens with a

description of zombie-like commuters stumbling their way to work in the dark

through a city strewn with detritus and decay. Armah turns Nkrumah’s idea of

animating Ghanaians upside-down, suggesting he turned them into hapless

sleepwalkers.

According to Birmingham, it was the increasing disconnect between such

disturbing domestic realities and the pan-African dream that caused Nkrumah’s

broader account of the various causes of economic decline, despite the huge

investment of his government’s ‘big push’, see Tony Killick, Development

Economics in Action: a study of the economic policies in Ghana (London:

Heinemann, 1978).

110 Ayi Kwei Armah The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born (London: Heinneman,

1969)

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unpopularity.111 He was forced to defend his generous financial support for

impoverished Guinea, which had even more emphatically cast off European

patronage112 while Ghanaians themselves struggled with economic hardship. His

deployment of troops in Congo in 1960 to support the besieged regime there

showed up the inadequacies of Ghana’s military capacity and led to the

humiliation of its officers. A lavish banquet thrown in Accra for visiting heads of

state in 1965 to promote pan-Africanism was a ‘disaster’, creating the

impression of a leader oblivious to suffering and poverty at home, and a failure

in terms of objectives of closer international cooperation. The last straw for

military leaders was Nkrumah’s plan to deploy troops in Rhodesia at the

Universal Declaration of Independence in 1965: unable to stomach more badly-

planned foreign adventures, the officers acted. ‘Pan-African idealism brought

Nkrumah’s final ruin’, says Birmingham.113

Pan-Africanism – like the repudiation of the West – had always been a fantasy.

Nkrumah’s first pan-Africa meeting in Accra in 1957 had been an ‘electrifying

gathering’, but from 1960, when other African countries began to achieve

independence, differences with Nkrumah’s vision began to emerge.114

111 Birmingham (1998).

112 Donal Cruise O’Brien, Symbolic Confrontations: Muslims imagining the state

in Africa (London: Hurst, 2003).

113 Birmingham (1998), p. 109.

114 Gocking (2005) p. 126.

47

Dissent from the ‘gradualists’,115 grew among most of the Francophone countries

which were keen to keep ties with their former colonial power (Leopold Senghor

of Senegal and Houphouet Boigny of Cote d’Ivoire, for example, were happy to

maintain French trade links, currency and education systems alongside powerful

emotional attachments),116 and from leaders who were suspicious of his

tendency to assume leadership of the continent, and who jealously guarded their

own sovereignty.117 Even in his relations with his closest ally Guinea, attempts to

pool sovereignty were undermined by the fact that ‘the two countries had no

common border, no common language, no common traditions of administration,

of defense, of policing, or of foreign relations’118 as well as ‘differing external

commitments, and rival political ambitions’.119

The relationship with the West was far more complicated too. Nkrumah

remained deeply ambivalent towards the West, harbouring an admiration for

Britain and a ‘love-hate’ relationship with America. After a painful debate, he

pragmatically accepted English as the language of the state because it was the

best way to overcome competition between Ghana’s many indigenous languages

and from the start he viewed Western investment as essential for his

115 Guy Martin, African Political Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

116 Cruise O’Brien (2003).

117 Gocking (2005); Marcum (1962).

118 Birmingham (1998), p. 103.

119 Marcum (1962), p. 57.

48

modernisation programme.120 He rejected the queen as head of state in 1960, yet

remained fascinated by her, seeing her as a ‘fairy godmother’ figure.121 And of

course, Nkrumah’s ardent advocacy of modernisation and industrialisation was

rooted in his desire to emulate Western economic success.

Reading Africa must Unite alongside contemporary accounts of Ghana like

Armah’s, one is contemplating a picture of Nkrumah entering into an

increasingly detached and frenzied insistence on his idealised view of the wider

world, while his compatriots experience their country gently rotting away. This

divergence suggests a growing perception of the mismatch between Nkrumah’s

misrecognised international relationships and the fantasy Ghana he had built on

top of them. Misrecognition had reached its limits, as reality testing increasingly

broke down clear-cut categories. In Armah’s description of miserable decay, we

see Ghanaians struggling with a Kleinian ‘depressive position’, far more aware of

their own fragility and state of muddle than their leader whose continued

pursuit of fantasy relationships became increasingly manic.

When Colonel E. K. Kotoka announced the removal of Nkrumah’s government on

Ghana Radio on the morning of the coup he said: ‘The myth surrounding

Nkrumah has been broken.’122 Apter noted that the country felt ‘provincial and

quiet after Nkrumah, the problems now being confronted as local but real, where

120 Fuller (2014).

121 Birmingham (1998), p. 129.

122 Quoted in Rooney (1988) p. 251.

49

before they were grandiose and unreal’. Politics were now about ’the practical

and the mundane’ rather than ’the drama and the opportunity presented by

radical politics’.123 Nkrumah took glamour, fantasy and ideas of greatness with

him.

Ghanaians now had to engage in relationships with much more ambiguous

others upon which they both depended and from which they differed – these

would assume relationships grounded in struggles for recognition, anchored in

more complex object-relations. The attempts to repudiate the West gave way to

more calculated overtures wherein a succession of military leaders attempted to

cultivate lucrative relationships, until one of them, Jerry Rawlings, threw his lot

entirely in with the Washington Institutions in the 1980s, in his bid to fix the

country’s troubled economy.124 Relationships with other African countries could

not be idealised anymore either. Pan-Africanism was not realised in the form

that Nkrumah hoped for. He worried in 1963 that ‘in the early flush of

independence, some of the new African states are jealous of their sovereignty

and tend to exaggerate their separatism’.125 As Africa’s new states began to take

123 Apter (1968) p. 762.

124 See D. Green ‘Ghana: structural adjustment and state (re)formation’, in

Villalon and Huxtable (eds) The African State at a Critical Juncture (Lynne

Rienner, Boulder, 1998); and Richard Jeffries ‘Leadership Commitment and

Political Opposition to Structural Adjustment in Ghana’, in D Rothchild (ed)

Ghana: the political economy of recovery (Boulder, Lynne Rienner, 1991).

125 Nkrumah (1998) p. 148.

50

shape, they did prefer to make themselves into separate entities. The African

Union, successor to the Organisation of African Union that Nkrumah helped

establish, continues to frustrate advocates of pan-Africanism. Tim Murithi begins

his analysis of ‘The African Union at Ten’: ‘As the African Union marked its tenth

anniversary on 9 July 2012, it was still recovering from one of its most public

disagreements.’126 The organisation remains, he writes, 'at its core, a disparate

collection of nation states’.127

This seems to me to be a good description of ‘a relational dynamic of mutual

constitution: the subject contributes to shape the object and the object allows the

self to “cognize” itself in it’.128 Nkrumah himself could not apparently grasp a

Ghana ‘immersed in the messiness of life’,129 but ultimately, by bringing Ghana

into being through misrecognition, he enabled it to develop the self-

consciousness with which to begin to do so.

Practically, the AU has continued to help shape African states into viable entities.

Pan-Africanism remains an underlying ideal – a creative fantasy – while the

hammering out of compromise between competing interests at the AU – bumpy,

conflictual, irritable – looks more like struggles for recognition. The power of

126 Tim Murithi ‘The African Union at Ten: an appraisal’ African Affairs 111:445,

2012, pp. 662–9; p. 662.

127 Murithi (2012) p. 668.

128 Epstein et al (this SI, 2018) p. XX

129 Epstein et al (this SI, 2018) p. XX

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Nkrumah’s idealised misrecognition is constantly revived by his admirers – and

there are many of them in recent years as his reputation as a bold, visionary

African leader has been rehabilitated.130 Perhaps he, like anything, is easier to

idealise from a distance. The combination of these levels is a story of

misrecognition – ideas of others that are based on fantasy, copies of internal

objects – and flashes of recognition, seen in the more grounded, underlying grasp

of others as fuller, more complex and ambiguous objects. Misrecognition in the

early years, but an underlying and emerging recognition too: both are part of the

creation of Ghana’s statehood.

Conclusion

Like other contributors to this SI, I have argued that states achieve subjectivity

through struggles for recognition. But my particular argument has been that

misrecognition both protects against these struggles and enables, or even drives

the pursuit of them. Misrecognition’s protective capacity can be found in many

other instances of bellicose posturing and populist leadership that projects a

world of apparent certainty within which fantasies of omnipotence can flourish,

from Mugabe to Brexit to Putin. Misrecognition is not just the preserve of ‘infant

states’.

130 Nkrumah was voted Africa’s ‘Man of the Millennium' in a BBC World Service

Poll in 1999

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/highlights/000914_nkrumah.shtm

l, cited 8 March 2018).

52

However, when it comes to an ‘infant state’ like Ghana was in 1957, omnipotence

fantasies protect against the acute anxieties raised in a ‘paranoid-schizoid’

position. Thompson points out that Ghana managed to portray itself as a heavy-

weight world player in its early years.131 This was only possible because it was

led by a man of enormous imagination who could encapsulate and project the

fantasies of his new country. He made ‘being Ghana’ possible in the early years

because he created a vivid and persuasive fantasy. The Ghana he enabled, built

on fantasy, crumbled beneath him, and its collapse drove a new kind of

engagement with the wider world, built on a struggle for recognition, that

enabled the emergence of a more ambiguous but ultimately more solid statehood

– the realization that selfhood rests on the inevitable tension between wanting to

be and wanting to be separate from, external objects. This, I suggest, is why the

Ghanaian state achieved as a product of Nkrumah’s pan-African ideal, rather

than in spite of it.

131 W. Scott Thompson Ghana’s Foreign Policy 1957-1966: diplomacy, ideology,

and the new state (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. xvii.